lePunk in MarketingLand – Week #1

I’ve launched my new product about 4 weeks ago. Sales been great, but my PPC bill is bit higher than I expected. Turns out I have competition. Well, this sucks balls, but I decided that instead of throwing money at the problem I do a little experiment.

I’ve read an article on Hacker News (i can’t find it anymore, sorry) about a guy who was doing one little growth hack a day to improve user experience and income / user. I decided to do a similar thing but with marketing. To be precise free / low cost marketing. Every night during the past week I spent an hour trying out different marketing “hacks” / methods to improve my search engine rankings, build my list and generally drive traffic and sales to my site. Here is what I did:

General on-site SEO:
When I launched my product I generally just wanted to get it out there without caring too much about SEO. My site content wasn’t keyword rich and i had the same title on every page. So I spent the first night with researching keywords and updating my site. I looked at the competition’s rankings and decided on some phrases where I think I can beat them. Updated my title, keywords and description tags. Not rocket science and I can’t tell if I did it right but will see on the long term.

Building backlinks:
SEO gurus say that Google don’t really care about backlinks anymore, unless they are coming from quality sites. I call bullshit on that one. On the 2nd night I found a guy onf Fiverr who were willing to send my link to 150 social bookmarking sites for $5. I gave him 10 different variations of titles and descriptions and asked him to spread the 150 bookmarks to 100 for inner pages and 50 for my main site. He delivered the work quickly and as of today I can see the improvements. My site is well indexed and GoogleBot is a regular visitor, which is nice if I want to try different on-page SEO strategies. Also I’m now on page 4 and 5 for my main keywords.

Video link juiceBefore launching my site I made a pretty good promo video using Animoto. On Wednesday I found a nice Indian fella on Fiverr who was offering to upload my video to 50 different video hosts along with my descriptions and link back to my main site for a fiver. No brainer. He delivered the job promptly and provided me with a report with links to the videos. Then I hired the guy from Tuesday to social bookmark that 50 video links creating some link juice. As of today some of the videos are actually ranking on the 1st page of Google for my main keyword. Pretty good for 10 bucks

Script directories
On Thursday I submitted my site to Hotscripts and other similar script directories. According to my previous experience with selling scripts these directories are great for traffic, but not much of a help with SEO. Also it take ages for them to approve the links, but at least its done now.

Friday
On Friday I went out drinking. Fuck the system

List building
During the Saturday hangoverness I read some basic ebooks about how list building works. Basically you build your list buy giving away something for free in exchange for the user’s email address and name, and from that point you can send offers to that email address. Sounds straight forward. For the first step I fired up my pre-existing GetResponse account and did some further integration with my site. Now if someone orders my product, or uses the contact form he automatically has the option to opt-in to my list. Also I’m segmenting my list based on where the user in the process. My labels are “Interested”, “Registered” and “Ordered”.

Wrote an ebook
During the development of my script I set up a test site which I needed to promote to validate that the script itself will be profitable for my customers. In order to do that I developed a fairly unique promotion method for Pinterest. Today I decided to write down this method in a short, 7 pages long e-book, which I’m giving away for free. Don’t look at my squeeze page, it is ugly as hell but whatever. Will pretty it up whenever I have some time.

That is it for this week. I’m dedicated to do these kind of little improvements every day up until the point when I can just shut down my PPC campaigns and rely completely on organic traffic.